Uncle John's Presents: Book of the Dumb Read online

  —Kalamazoo Gazette

  “It would be easier to care about the fate of Justin and Kelly’s relationship if they had an ounce of chemistry between them. These kids are not so much Frankie and Annette as Donny and Marie. Their big kissing scene holds a lurid fascination: You almost feel you’re watching something unseemly.”

  —Orlando Sentinel

  “Justin meets Kelly. Justin loses Kelly. Dialogue coach checks into hospital with self-inflicted head wound.”

  —Efilmcritic.com

  ARMS AND THE MAN

  The Scene: State Correctional Institution at Pine Grove in Pennsylvania. Two prisoners are standing around observing the stainless-steel toilet that comes—no extra charge!—as just one of the many amenities of that fine establishment. Finally, our first prisoner, “Jed,” speaks.

  Jed: I knew a guy that got his arm stuck in one of them toilets.

  Jud (the other prisoner): Ah, you’re nuts. That’s just one of them prison legends, like the one about the guy that escaped with a spoon and a bar of soap. You can’t stick your arm that far into a toilet.

  Jed: I’ll bet you could if you tried.

  Jud: You’re wrong, and I’ll prove it to you by sticking my arm into this toilet.

  And so it came to pass that Jud did stick his arm into the toilet, just to show that it could not, in fact, get stuck. Whereupon Jud discovered that his pal’s tale rang true; his arm had become lodged in the stainless-steel can.

  The Arms Race

  This is because Jed wasn’t lying: firefighters had been called to the same prison to “free” another inmate whose arm had become trapped in the john. The previous inmate’s excuse for sticking his arm into the toilet was that he had dropped a bar of soap into it and was trying to retrieve it. Apparently Jud, now up to his forearm in the prison loo, hadn’t been in jail at the time of the first incident.

  So the firefighters were called out once again to remove a toilet from a prisoner’s arm; to do so they had to unbolt the thing from the floor and use an air chisel to cut the thing off. Jud, in addition to his original crime of aggravated assault, now faced more sanctions, and owed the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania the cost of a new stainless-steel toilet. That’s a lot of hours stamping license plates.

  Source: Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

  CHUTZPAH, INDIAN STYLE

  A man accused of forgery and cheating the Indian army decided that this whole court thing was a real waste of his time. So he tried to bribe his judge by passing her a note with his bail application: “You should release me immediately and also decide the case in my favour. Once I am released, I shall furnish your fee for this favour by cheque.”

  Now, aside from the legal ramifications involved, why might the judge not want to do this? That’s right: that forgery charge. The enraged judge had the defendant read the note aloud in court, and then tossed him into jail. Bail was denied, of course.

  Source: Ananova

  ROLL CALL

  There are some things the public doesn’t need to know about its government—things our elected officials do that are so heinous, so disturbing, so horrifying, that they’re best kept from the population at large. For example, eating cinnamon rolls.

  Yes, “cinnamon rolls” was the excuse given by the Denver City Council for banning the cameras of a public television station from a session of the council. Council-woman Jeanne Faatz made the request days in advance. Apparently she thought that the televised image of elected representatives chowing down on sticky buns would be too much for the populace to handle.

  Now, coincidentally, the cinnamon rolls were consumed at a council meeting that touched on the issue of the extremely cash-strapped Denver government possibly having to lay off city workers. Which you might think would be a good reason not to televise the proceedings; after all, everyone loves a surprise, especially when it involves your job. But no, the council insisted it was the cinnamon rolls, which only makes us more curious. How do the Denver City Council members eat their cinnamon rolls? Do they ingest them like normal people? Or do they do it in some odd way?

  Citizens of Denver, we think you have the right to know how your elected officials consume their hot, glazed treats. But we cannot fight this fight for you. This is one struggle you must fight on your own. Hit the doughnut shop first.

  Source: Associated Press

  HISTORICAL DUMBOSITY: THE ZIMMERMANN TELEGRAM

  World War I is the setting for perhaps the single greatest diplomatic blunder in history: the Zimmermann Telegram. Let’s set the scene: It’s early 1917, and the Germans and their allies have been fighting the French and English (and just about everyone else in Europe, with Canada and Japan tossed in for fun) for a good three years. The United States has been sitting out this little squabble, much to the despair of Great Britain, which is bleeding to death financially and has limited military resources. Germany knows that if the Americans enter the war, it’ll be on the British side, and that’ll be no good for the Kaiser. It’s in Germany’s interest to keep America neutral for as long as humanly possible.

  Meet the Mastermind

  Enter Arthur Zimmermann, Germany’s foreign minister. Zimmermann decided that if the U.S. wouldn’t stay neutral, then he should distract it. His strategy: an attack by Mexico! His plan was to convince Mexico that what it really wanted to do was start a border war with its northern neighbor. The U.S. would be so busy defending the Rio Grande that it wouldn’t be able to get troops “over there.” Somehow, in all the excitement, Japan, then currently allied with Great Britain, would change sides just for the fun of it and attack the U.S., too! What a swell plan!

  The Logistics

  Of course, Zimmermann didn’t expect Mexico to attack the U.S. out of the kindness of its own heart. Germany would kick in cash to outfit the Mexicans and, when all was said and done, Mexico could have back the territory it lost to the U.S. You know: Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and stuff like that. The U.S. would hardly miss ’em. It was a fine plan; now all Zimmermann had to do was tell Mexico about it.

  He decided that the best way to get his message to Mexico was to go to the American embassy in Berlin and use its telegraph to send the message (encrypted, of course) to the German ambassador to the United States, who would then forward the message to Mexico. Now, you might think that using a U.S. telegraph line to send a message proposing an attack on the U.S. is a really dumb thing to do, and you’d be right. But probably not because of the reason you might suspect, which would be that the U.S. would somehow intercept the message. In fact, the U.S. was blissfully clueless about the content of the message it was sending down the line.

  The British Wiles

  No, it was stupid because the telegraph cable that went from Germany to the United States went through Great Britain—and the British had the line tapped. And not only did the British have the line tapped, they had also cracked the German military code, primarily through the British Navy stealing German code books from German ships they had sunk. This meant that the British could read Zimmermann’s encrypted message to the German ambassador—indeed, could read it more quickly than most German coded messages, since most German messages were encoded twice. Zimmermann’s was encoded only once.

  The German Soft Spot

  Why didn’t Zimmermann stop to consider that the telegraph line might be tapped, or that the German codes might be compromised? Zimmermann simply assumed that the German codes were so clever that they couldn’t be cracked. And when they were cracked, he chalked it up to German carelessness—someone must have left a decoded version lying around. This same sort of arrogance would help the British 30 years later during World War II, when the Brits cracked the famous Enigma code and thus kept a critical intelligence edge over the Nazis. Thank God some people never learn.

  The American Dilemma

  But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Back in 1917, the British decoded the Zimmermann message and gave it Woodrow Wilson, the American president. Up to this point, Wilson had been fighting a r
ear-guard battle to keep the U.S. out of the war, but the idea of Germany negotiating with Mexico to carve up the U.S. like a Thanksgiving turkey really changed the climate. On March 1, 1917, American newspapers got hold of the telegram and predictably went nuts. Americans from coast to coast (and one suspects, especially in Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico) were outraged and spoiling to chuck the whole neutrality thing and kick some German tail.

  But there still was an out: if Germany said that the telegram was a fake, everyone would be willing to forget it happened. Sure, the U.S. public was all riled up, but they could be toweled off and calmed down. Everybody could just step away from the diplomatic powder keg, leaving it unsparked and unexploded.

  The Mastermind Strikes Again

  So, of course, Zimmermann strolled in with a Molotov cocktail and threw it right on the powder. In one of the most mind-boggling diplomatic screw-ups in the history of man, Zimmermann refused to deny he’d written the telegram. “How can I?” he said. “It is true.” In one sense it’s admirable that, like George Washington, Zimmermann could not tell a lie. But in doing so, he also doomed Germany to defeat, which was probably not what he intended. The United States declared war against Germany in April 1917; in November 1918, World War I was over and Germany was hammered flat by the Treaty of Versailles. In all, not a real smooth move by Arthur Zimmermann.

  And what of Mexico, you ask? Well, perhaps it recalled that the last time it went up against the U.S. it ended up forking over two-thirds of its land. A similar arrangement after another war might leave it with the Yucatan peninsula and not much else. Mexico politely declined Germany’s offer of an alliance, suggesting blandly that the “premature publication” of the Zimmermann telegram made such an alliance politically disadvantageous. That’s one way of putting it.

  LET’S LEAVE HITLER OUT OF IT

  Glenview State Bank of Illinois apologized to its customers after a newsletter observed that among the world leaders of the Depression-laden 1930s, Hitler alone presided over an expanding economy: “If we can understand why Depression-era Germany resisted the disease, we may better understand how alarmed we should be today in the 21st century,” it read. Needless to say, the Anti-Defamation League was all over this baby nearly instantly, and the bank hastily retracted all claims of Hitler’s economic genius.

  Source: Chicago Sun-Times

  “There is no sin except stupidity.”

  —Oscar Wilde

  “It is only governments that are stupid, not the masses of people.”

  —Dwight D. Eisenhower

  “Success in almost any field depends more on energy and drive than it does on intelligence. This explains why we have so many stupid leaders.”

  —Sloan Wilson

  A COMBUSTIBLE SITUATION

  Surely “Stanley” knew the police were coming for him. After all, when you spend your day (allegedly) harassing a woman with a hammer, crowbar, and rock, and then attempt some property damage on her house, you’ve pretty much put yourself on that day’s police list of “People Who Should Be Cuffed and Read Their Rights.”

  But Stanley wasn’t in the mood to interact in a positive manner with the local law enforcement of Gillette, Wyoming. So when the police showed up to give Stan an all-expenses-paid trip to the station, he countered with his own offer. He crawled underneath a nearby car, punctured the gas tank with a pen knife, and then declared that if the police got near him, he’d set the car on fire. And then, apparently just to prove that he was serious, he lit himself on fire, using a cigarette lighter to light up his gasoline-soaked clothes.

  Burning with Bad Intentions

  You can see the flaw in the plan here. To be honest, the plan was bad to begin with. Sure, threatening to blow up the car should have kept the cops at a distance, but then what? It’s not like the cops would leave. And Stan couldn’t spend the rest of his life prone beneath the wheels of someone else’s automobile. But when you light yourself on fire, you know the cops aren’t going to idly stand by. It’s behavior that practically begs the police to intervene.

  Once Stan inflamed himself, the cops ran in, pulled him out from under the car, put him out, and arrested him on suspicion of aggravated assault and battery and third-degree arson. Looks like he got that all-expenses-paid trip down to the police station after all.

  Source: Associated Press

  DON’T TAKE THE CAR!

  The first time the German three-year-old got behind the wheel, it was something of a fluke: he took the keys to the car, stuck them into ignition and drove about 10 yards before crashing the car. The kid was fine, but the car suffered about $5,000 in damage.

  But there’s no excuse for the second incident: a TV crew came to do a story about the kid, and they placed him in the car for a shot. When they weren’t looking, the kid started the car and drove off again—crashing into another car and causing another $1,200 or so in damages. And he escaped unhurt again, thank goodness. Someone hide the keys already.

  Source: Ananova

  A POWERFUL CLERICAL ERROR

  Remember that time you accidentally transposed columns in a spreadsheet program and then when you printed out your report it said that your company had spent $100,000 on staples? Didn’t you feel like a first-class moron? Well, relax. The guys at TransAlta Corp have you beat.

  TransAlta is Canada’s largest private power producer and wholesale power marketing company, with over $6 billion in assets, including coal-fired, gas-fired, hydro-fueled, and renewable power plants. You name it, TransAlta wrenches power from it. One of the things it does is to bid on energy contracts, like it did in May 2003, when it bid on transmission congestion contracts from the New York Independent System Operator. This sort of contract lets the state of New York keep power costs from spiraling madly out of control when there’s a power crunch, and power providers bid on them regularly.

  They Don’t Excel at Proofreading

  In the process of putting together its bids for the contracts, someone at TransAlta put the wrong information in the wrong place in an Excel spreadsheet. “It was literally a cut-and-paste error,” TransAlta president Steve Snyder later told analysts. What this cut-and-paste error did was signal to the state of New York that TransAlta wanted to buy fifteen times the number of contracts it really wanted to buy, all at a higher price than it wanted to pay. Before TransAlta caught the error, the bids were accepted, and apparently in the high-stakes world of power management, there is no such thing as a do-over.

  The cost to TransAlta for this spreadsheet error? $24 million dollars, and that’s in U.S. and not Canadian dollars. That’s a lot of staples.

  Sources: Toronto Globe & Mail, Canadian Press

  GIVE ME YOUR TIRED, HUNGRY, AND MILDLY OBESE

  A Venezuelan woman filed for political asylum in Canada on the grounds that if she were to return to her home country, people would make fun of her because she was fat. Citizenship and Immigration Canada declined her application because, among other things, “at the hearing, the claimant did not appear to fit the dictionary definition of obese.” Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Venezuela’s Canadian embassy denied chubby women were persecuted in that country. “My mother is overweight and she is very happy,” the spokesperson said.

  Source: National Post (Canada)

  COURT ORDER: DECEASED SPOUSE MUST PAY ALIMONY

  In May 2003, an appeals court in Boston ruled that an ex-husband had to continue paying alimony to his ex-wife despite the interesting mitigating circumstance that he’d been dead for five years.

  But Is It Legal? You Bet!

  The reason? The wording of the alimony agreement between the former married couple. In general, once you’re dead, you’re relieved of any additional need to pay alimony (or, for that matter, to pay for anything). However, in the agreement, our husband agreed to pay alimony until the “death or remarriage” of his spouse. In other words, all it said was that the ex-wife had to die or remarry to stop getting alimony. It never specified that the ex-husband had to remain liv
ing to pay it.

  The lawyers for the estate of the ex-husband maintained that the wording was ambiguous and that the ex-husband never intended to keep paying alimony after he died. But the appeals court found no ambiguity in the agreement. Justice Mel Greenberg wrote, “[The ex-wife] has neither died nor remarried, and therefore [the ex-husband’s] estate is bound to continue making payments.”

  So let that be a warning to all you would-be-bitter ex-husbands: Remember to specify “Till Death Do We Part.” Even after the divorce.

  Source: Boston Herald

  HARRY POTTER AND THE REALITY-IMPAIRED FAN

  Now, we love those Harry Potter books just as much as anyone. But while we enjoy the adventures of Harry, Ron, Hermione, and everyone else loitering around Hogwart’s, we always keep a grip on one unassailable fact: it’s all fictional. This is why we don’t hurl ourselves out of a second-story window, riding a broom and looking for other wizards to participate in a quick pickup game of Quidditch. As appealing as the idea may be, the real world (and the force of gravity therein) would quickly assert itself.

  Would that “Eva” had clearly delineated the realms of fantasy and reality, but the 21-year-old native of Madrid had not. Armed with “wizardry” she would later claim was inspired by the Potter books, Eva decided she would make a magic potion. And so she set to work, mixing olive oil, rubbing alcohol, and toothpaste together. She put it on the stove to cook it and waited for something spectacular to happen.